Yehuda Amichai: Four Lines, Annotated

Learners expect difficult poetry to contain difficult morphology, and Hebrew trains that expectation hard — its literary register really does have bound possessives, אשר, infinitive absolutes and verb forms nobody says out loud. Then you open Yehuda Amichai and there is almost none of it. The four lines below run on one pi'el verb, one hif'il verb, two construct chains and a comparative, in vocabulary an A2 learner already has. They are still literature, and this page is about where the difference actually lives — one preposition, one tense, and one collocation three thousand years old.

The excerpt

Modern Hebrew poetry is printed unpointed, so the lines are given as bare ktiv male, the way you would meet them on the page.

Yehuda Amichai, "אלוהים מרחם על ילדי הגן", from עכשיו ובימים האחרים (1955). Excerpt for educational commentary only. The quotation stops here, mid-sentence; the rest of the poem is not reproduced on this page.

Printings differ over the line-final commas, and older ones spell the first word in classical ktiv haser, אלהים. Sourced facts, and nothing beyond them: the collection was Amichai's first and won the Shlonsky Prize in 1957; its title comes from this poem's closing line; Gidi Koren's setting, recorded by האחים והאחיות, reached number four on the Kol Yisrael chart in 1973; and Yitzhak Rabin invited Amichai to read at the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, where this was among the poems he read (he.wikipedia, אלוהים מרחם על ילדי הגן).

רִחֵם עַל — a preposition that is not about position

ריחם rikhém is a pi'el verb, and its complement is obligatorily על. That על is not spatial in any sense — it is simply the preposition this verb requires, the way English rely requires on without meaning a physical position. This matters far beyond one poem, because Hebrew has a large family of verbs built the same way, and a learner who reads their על as "on" mistranslates all of them.

Only the first two line up with English, which is why this is a memorisation job rather than a translation job; the full inventory is on verbs that take על. When the object of על is a pronoun, על inflects — עליי, עליך, עליו, עליה, עלינו, עליכם, עליהם — and that is the form you will actually produce in speech; the paradigm is on על inflected.

Two construct chains, and definiteness coming from the far end

ילדי הגן and ילדי בית הספר are both construct chains, and the second has a chain nested inside it: בית הספר is itself a construct pair, with ילדי built on top of the whole thing.

The rule English speakers keep tripping over is that a chain takes its definiteness from its last member. הגן is definite, so the whole of ילדי הגן is — "the children of the kindergarten", not "children of the kindergarten". Nothing marks it at the front, and nothing can: the first noun of a chain does not carry ה־ in the standard language. See definiteness in smichut.

פחות מזה, and an adjective standing on its own

פחות מזה is an elliptical comparative: "less than that". What is elided is the verb — Hebrew does not repeat מרחם, and neither does English repeat has mercy. Both allow the gap; the difference is that Hebrew leaves nothing behind to hold the place, because it has no auxiliary like does. The comparative machinery — יותר, פחות, מ־ — is on comparatives.

הגדולים is an adjective used as a noun — "the big ones", here "the grown-ups". Hebrew does this freely and without any extra word: put the article on an adjective and it becomes a noun phrase, where English needs ones, people or a paraphrase. See adjectives used as nouns.

The tense shift is the poem, and it is pure grammar

Line 1 has מרחם, a participle — the Hebrew present. Line 3 has ירחם, the prefix form — the Hebrew future. Same root, same binyan, two tenses, and the switch does all the work.

Here is the part textbooks skip. לא ירחם עוד is not a prediction about a date. Nothing says when. The Hebrew future is regularly used for what simply is the case, going forward — how things go, rather than a scheduled event. English marks that with the present simple, so a translator is forced to choose and the Hebrew form is neither one thing nor the other. You meet this constantly outside poetry, wherever English uses a generic present:

The other uses of the prefix form — real prediction, intention, request — are on using the future.

עוד under a negation

עוד is one word doing two jobs English splits between still / more and any more: on its own it is "still, more, another", and under לא the frame לא … עוד is "no longer". Do not confuse it with עוד לא, "not yet" — same two words, reversed order, opposite direction in time, and its own page at עוד לא and עדיין לא.

ישאירם: the one form on the page that is not everyday

Line 4 is where the register does shift. ישאירם is יַשְׁאִיר, the hif'il future, plus the bound object suffix ־ֵם "them". Everyday Israeli Hebrew says ישאיר אותם, with a separate word; a bound object suffix on a verb is (literary) — you read it, you rarely say it. Recognising it is the skill; producing it would sound like a legal notice.

Where the register actually comes from

There is no archaism in these lines — not one form a modern Israeli would call old-fashioned, apart from the bound suffix in line 4. The syntax is the syntax of a text message.

What is old is a collocation. ריחם plus על, a father, and children is a formula from the liturgy and from the text underneath it. Psalm 103:13 puts all of it in one verse: כְּרַחֵם אָב עַל־בָּנִים רִחַם יְהוָה עַל־יְרֵאָיו — "as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him" (Masoretic text via Sefaria). A Hebrew reader hears that behind Amichai's first line the way an English reader hears the King James behind the valley of the shadow.

So the register clash is the poetic device, and it is lexical rather than grammatical. That is worth stating as a general fact about Hebrew, because it is how the language builds depth: Hebrew has layers where other languages have complexity, and a sentence an A2 learner can parse becomes literature because of what one phrase in it is quoting.

Watch how quickly the same two words fall back to everyday register when the frame changes:

Common Mistakes

1. Reading the על of ריחם as spatial. The verb requires it; it contributes no location.

2. Reading עוד in לא ירחם עוד as "more". Both readings exist; the negation picks between them.

3. Dropping the על from a verb that requires one. English repeat the material is transitive, so the Hebrew arrives with את and no preposition.

4. Reading the ־ם of ישאירם as a plural subject. It looks like the masculine plural verb ending, and it is not one.

5. Marking the wrong end of a construct chain. English fronts the, so the article lands on ילדי.

Key Takeaways

• ריחם על is a pi'el verb whose complement is obligatorily על, and that על is not spatial. Its family — סמך על, חזר על, ויתר על, השפיע על, חשב על, הסתכל על, שמר על — mostly does not use on in English at all.
• ילדי הגן and ילדי בית הספר are construct chains, the second with one nested inside it, and both take their definiteness from the last member. The first noun can never carry ה־.
• פחות מזה is an elliptical comparative with the verb unrepeated; הגדולים is an adjective standing as a noun, which Hebrew does with nothing but the article.
• The tense shift מרחם merakhém → לא ירחם lo yerakhém is the poem. The Hebrew future here predicts nothing; it states how things go, where English uses a generic present.
• עוד is still / more alone and no longer under לא — while עוד לא, reversed, is "not yet".
• ישאירם is the excerpt's only elevated form: a bound object suffix on a verb, (literary). Everyday Hebrew says ישאיר אותם.
• The elevation is lexical, not grammatical. The syntax is ordinary modern Hebrew; what is old is the collocation — ריחם with על, a father and children — which Psalm 103:13 supplies in a single verse.